Sandra H Peterson

Wish I could give zero stars, much like many others are saying if you read the reviews. Absolute TRASH of a lawyer. He does not care one bit about his clients. He lead my fiancé on for a YEAR saying that he’d have a good outcome in court. Finally, the court date came, and my fiancé got the worst deal/outcome possible in a child support case. Peterson did not even try to fight back. Just let his client (my fiancé) get totally screwed. We do NOT recommend him at all for child support cases. Another review said he is two-faced and I absolutely agree with that.

Would leave zero stars at this point if I could. My boyfriend previously used Mr. Peterson for a custody/child support case as well as his family has used their law office for quite some time so when we needed to handle the custody/child support case for his youngest, he wanted to go to Mr. Peterson again. Had I known then what I do now, we wouldn’t have given them a penny. They never kept us informed. We missed due dates because they didn’t tell us what forms had to be filed and when which ended up with the other attorney filing motions to compel as though he was purposefully not providing the information. We just didn’t know because we weren’t told! When the first mediation was set we learned of it from the other party, not Mr. Peterson or anyone at the office. Let me just add before I go further- I work in a law firm (mind you a different field of law) so I know a good amount so they were given permission to go through me as I understand more of it. Well they would rarely speak to me, never returned calls and hardly ever returned emails, even calls and emails that came directly from him. We found out that first mediation got canceled by my searching for case updates on the clerk of courts system. Then mediation got scheduled for another date and guess who didn’t inform us again? Yep! I found that on the clerk website as well. Fast forward to the mediation and Mr. Peterson supposedly had an emergency hearing. That’s fine and dandy but it pushed into our mediation time and we got started more than an hour late. Still not a problem but then Mr. Peterson said he had to leave to run an errand by noon and the mediation was not complete. Some items were agreed upon but there were several remaining. The mediator noted those and said we could reschedule to finish mediation in another session or our lawyers could discuss and finalize the plan without having to go to court. We tried countless times to find out the results of this and asked to be able to review this plan before it was sent to the other attorney and crickets. For months! It got to the point where the other party just dropped the case because they got sick of not hearing anything back. This case was opened mid 2021 and dropped July 2022. We found out by looking at the clerks page yet again. They never even informed us. Spoke to Dorothy and told her we wanted to appeal the case being dropped or reopen a new case with us as the petitioners because he needs a recorded custody/child support order in the books. Requested this multiple times. Again- nothing! We have now sent multiple letters via certified mail (so we know exactly when they got them and who received them) informing them that we are completely dissatisfied with the handling of the case and that we wanted an itemized invoice showing how our $3500 retainer was used (considering we did the majority of the work), and remaining balance returned to us (we are assuming they billed it up with false charges to show the entire retainer amount used), and a copy of all case files. It wasn’t until I started digging into his first child support case that I see the drafted final docs that Mr. Peterson did and he had my boyfriend’s name as something completely different. They put a line through it and wrote his name in. It also stated the Ex-husband and ex-wife in it- they were never married nor had my boyfriend ever been married. We contacted the clerk of court about this and they said that the lawyer should of drafted a new doc but that was what was officially filed with the court so unless they draw up an amendment, that’s going to reflect with the wrong information forever. That one closed in 2019. Because it has been months and we have heard nothing, he is driving out to his office today. Trust me- if we didn’t live almost 2 hours away from his office then we would of done this sooner but circumstances did not allow until today. It will be interesting to see how they react when he shows up in person demanding this stuff that we have requested and are legally entitled to! Never again!

The attorney gives good advice the majority of the time in my opinion.

Thank for the time and service very professional and prompt. And Miss Dorothy is a blessing.

Previously I reviewed Peterson as a five star lawyer and recommended them to everyone. I retained him for family law case mid 2022 custody + time sharing + child support. They mishandled my case worse than anything I had ever heard of, this is not only my understanding of it but several attorneys and even staff in judicial system agree. Sadly to say this is a once great but now crumbling family business.